Soviet Jews were the People of the Book. Denied all access to Scripture, they turned their bookshelves into major memory sites, fashioning a personal and collective identity out of historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, children’s verse, memoirs, travelogues, translations from Yiddish and modern Hebrew, and even anti-Zionist propaganda. Here is the untold story of their ongoing, multigenerational struggle for self-determination as told by a native son with great clarity, thoroughness, and empathy. Were this not enough, Marat Grinberg has also redefined Jewish literature as that which a living polity has rescued through conscious acts of creative rereading.

What made Soviet Jews Jewish? Superbly researched and lucidly argued, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf makes a convincing case for the formation of a unique Soviet Jewish identity through subversive and generative reading practices. The eponymous bookshelf, an important material and intellectual feature of the Soviet Jewish home, was capacious enough to hold a variety of texts, from Leon Feuchtwanger’s sweeping historical novels, to Alexandra Burshtein’s and Lev Kassil’s coming-of-age tales, and the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction. Soviet Jews mined the contents of the shelf for references to Jewishness—overt and oblique, empowering and disparaging—to bolster a sense of selfhood and peoplehood. Over and above making a significant scholarly contribution, Grinberg’s book bears witness to a community’s heroic struggle to survive against impossible odds.

Marat Grinberg’s original and engaging study locates the core of Russian-Jewish identity not in a particular language or religious faith, but in a canon of treasured books, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and a practice of reading ‘between the lines.’ Along the way, he offers provocative new interpretations of Soviet and non-Soviet classics alike.

(An) informative, engagingly written work that... pairs thorough research with the personal reading experiences of the author and those close to him.

Undoubtedly — as Marat Grinberg states — we can and should talk about the existence of Soviet Jewish culture which, although very heterogeneous, was nevertheless capable of struggling to organize, recreate and preserve its own Jewish self. The author of the book has therefore achieved his goal -- to break the silence around Wiesel’s silent Jews.